Category Archives: Argument

UPDATED (1/11): VIDEO & ESSAY: Genocide Was Trump’s Gateway Crime. Why The Surprise Over His Vanquishing Of Venezuela?

America, Argument, Colonialism, Democrats, Donald Trump, Law, Logic, Middle East, Military, Morality, Natural Law, Neoconservatism, Palestinians, Populism, Propaganda, Pseudo-history, Psychology & Pop-Psychology, Republicans, War

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“Trump is a second-rate gangster and he hates it. He wants to be Bibi.” ~ilana

“Surely, you don’t need mommy to tell you that murder is more than a secondary personality trait? It defines who a person is. It tends to crowd out all other positive attributes. If that’s not obvious, think of Oscar Wilde’s simple guidelines for cretins: ‘Murder is always a mistake. One should never do anything that one cannot talk about after dinner.'” ~ilana

NEW essay is “Genocide Was Trump’s Gateway Crime. Why The Surprise Over His Vanquishing Of Venezuela?“. It is now featured on the Unz Review, home of true dissidents from day one, and on LewRockwell.com, anti-war, anti-state, pro-markets .

Now on ILANAMERCER.COM

https://www.ilanamercer.com/2026/01/genocide-was-trumps-gateway-crime-why-the-surprise-over-his-vanquishing-of-venezuela/

Some choice excerpts (not contiguous): 

“The fuss and feathers over Trump’s foreign policy is silly, childish. It attests to what happens to the minds of men when they view the very public mass murder of The Other—committed by their Leader—as unrelated to their own moral integrity and future welfare: the brain goes to mush. Or perhaps it was the size of a lentil to begin with.

In the mind of the minimally moral, minimally compos mentis American—”America First” and genocide ought to be two mutually exclusive categories. 

Here’s a useful clue: If your politician of choice, going into an election, supports genocide or is silent about genocide; he’s not your friend. You ought to be smart enough, in possession of the very basic moral faculties—having reached a rudimentary development of conscience—to make that minuscule determination.

Has mommy not taught you that murder is wrong and that no mass murderer and congenital thief is your friend? Alas, the decay of the American Mind is such that Trump’s fans are apoplectic—and one or two has texted me in tears: “America First, Ilana; what-oh-what has happened to it?” …

….   That his phlegmatic followers now whinge and whine over Trump’s lackluster America-First focus is really quite puzzling, if not contemptible. It’s like complaining—not that serial killer Ted Bundy killed a lot; but that he was unpatriotic for driving around in a Volkswagen Beetle.

“Ever heard of a Chevy Tahoe, Ted? Boohoo, Bundy, why did you go to work in a Volkswagen, you traitor? Buy America, not German.

Bundy and Trump, Joe Biden and Bibi Netanyahu, and their minions, are murderers all. Murder is what defines them; it’s their defining feature. Except that the last three delegated mass murder to the mercenaries of a military. Bundy did the deeds himself.

Surely, you don’t need mommy to tell you that murder is more than a secondary personality trait? It defines who a person is. It tends to crowd out all other positive attributes. If that’s not obvious, think of Oscar Wilde’s simple guidelines for cretins: “Murder is always a mistake. One should never do anything that one cannot talk about after dinner.” …

…  “Genocide for Israel” is Trump’s de facto Middle East foreign policy.

Impoverished heroic Houthis of Yemen Trump has murdered beginning in 2018: The House of Trump in partnership with the House of Saud. Iranians Trump has helped murder. Somalis and Nigerians Trump has been murdering. Sailors in vessels, on the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific, no due process required: them, too, Trump has murdered. All this with nary a meaningful check on executive power from the dullards serving in the world’s “greatest” deliberative bodies, the US Congress and Senate.

And now Venezuelans, ordinary men and women, scan the skies nervously for the telltale metallic shimmer, wondering whether they are being simply surveilled from above, or targeted by Hellfire missiles. …

… Genocide, the crime of all crimes, was Trump’s gateway crime. Once you’ve crossed over to genocide, the world (and its people) is your oyster. …

… And his fans expected Trump to compartmentalize the killer-within and keep to his America-First promise? Are they dense? …

As to Venezuela: Trump knows nothing about the anti-imperial spirit of the Bolívar Revolution still animating Latin America. …  …  Trump’s handlers, only marginally smarter than he, tell him to say stuff that makes him seem in-the-know. So, Trump stammers about The Monroe Doctrine and the imperative to make errant Latin America submit to America (much like Arabia bows to Bibi).

Trump’s Other Handlers have yet to hand Trump his marching orders. But they’re happy. On Israel’s ILTV …”

…READ IT ALL NOW. “Genocide Was Trump’s Gateway Crime. Why The Surprise Over His Vanquishing Of Venezuela?“. It is now featured on the Unz Review, and on LewRockwell.com, anti-war, anti-state, pro-markets .

Now on ILANAMERCER.COM

I will update this post with a note on how you can–and really should—help a besieged dissident scribe (who is getting older and more tired).

*Screen picture on essay courtesy of antiwar.com

UPDATED (1/11): “Venezuela: Trump Is A Second-Rate Gangster, And He Hates It. He Wants To Be Bibi Netanyahu”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SZ5NTiDCCEk

UPDATE 1/7: 

Do the right thing in support of much-besieged work which adheres to Christian duties flouted by your leaders.  And, do so publicly. Anon is fine. Here is an example of the kind of weasel letters I get (after each piece)—have got for decades—which, as nice as it is, does no good. Preaching to the choir is worse than useless:

——– Original Message ——–
Subject: Why the National Interest Standard is Fake & Gayhttps://www.ilanamercer.com/2025/12/why-the-national-interest-standard-feels-fake-gay-solidarity-with-palestine-is-libertarian/
Date: 2025-12-17 08:21
From: kathleen lips
To: ilana@ilanamercer.com

Ilana — This column is brilliant. Thank you for your courage and for saying so many things that many of us think but are afraid to utter in public.

You are a hero to millions of us.

— David

Here is how men and women WITH a backbone can stand up:

Comment (anon if you like) on the blog (not to me). Each blog post corresponds to an essay. For example:

https://barelyablog.com/why-the-national-interest-standard-is-fake-gay-solidarity-with-palestine-is-libertarian/#comments

At Ron Unz anon is fine:

https://www.unz.com/imercer/genocide-was-trumps-gateway-crime-why-the-surprise-over-his-vanquishing-of-venezuela/#respond

Do a book Review of last book (another is due please God in April):

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0974103926

ESSAY: Why The ‘National-Interest’ Standard Is ‘Fake & Gay’ & Solidarity With Palestine Is Libertarian

Argument, Crime, Criminal Injustice, Donald Trump, Foreign Policy, GAZA, Israel, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, libertarianism, Logic, Middle East, Natural Law, Neoconservatism, Palestinians, Political Philosophy, Reason, The West, War

2 Replies

NEW ESSAY IS “Why The ‘National-Interest’ Standard Feels ‘Fake & Gay’ & Solidarity With Palestine Is Libertarian.” It appeared on The Unz Review, where it was one of two featured articles to lead the page, and on LewRockwell.com, anti-state, anti-war, pro-market.

Now on ILANAMERCER.COM.

Excerpt: 

Stateside, people speak of genocide as though it were an item of foreign-policy, albeit—small mercies—an unwelcome foreign policy event.

Absurd, of course!

Whether such crass utilitarians like it or not, the Anglo-Israeli-American genocide in Palestine is a moral matter, not to be subsumed within the confines of foreign policy, but transcending it.

“Genocide for Israel” is Trump’s de facto Middle East foreign policy. Enmeshed, the American and Israeli cabal, two self-appointed world powers, are presently and shamelessly still engaged in genocide. Israel acts to “disappear” the Palestinians as individuals, as a people and as a polity. Trump, who respects Israel’s wishes to the letter, appoints people who do the same. He pursues and imposes policies that dovetail with what Israel demands.

Israeli-American devilry has entailed the decimation of Palestinian habitat, the salting of their earth for decades to come; the despoiling and theft of their rightfully owned resources, the elimination of their historical artifacts and records; of thousands of their bloodlines. Gone are Gaza’s institutions of law, of learning of healing; their churches, their mosques, their leadership.

All ongoing. We are 790 days into Israel’s relentless bloodletting.

Trump, corporate media and the political ring leaders sashaying up and down both aisles may call the “new” dispensation under which Palestinians live a “ceasefire.” In point of fact, the so-called ceasefire is just Trump’s “engineered new normal: a slow-paced genocide.” For Israel.

The future of Gaza, Trump has made clear, would “be pretty much up to Israel.” When Israel declared its intention to take over Gaza, Donlad Trump had shrugged and egged them on. “Ramp it up,” he whooped. Having long since slipped between the sheets with soulmate Bibi Netanyahu, Trump gave the Israeli prime minister the go-ahead to “fight and finish the job.”

Under Gaza’s weeping winter skies, massacres continue. Drones, killer quadcopters and other Israeli shelling implements come scudding at Gaza from the north all the time. The “destruction of remaining homes, property and land, and the prevention of the entry of food, humanitarian aid and basic infrastructure materials” had never ceased, only let-up slightly. Genocide hums along now at the rate of more than eight human beings murdered a day, and at more than 20 injured, also each day, attest the Euro-Med’s human-rights monitors, on the ground.

By no unfortunate coincidence, Trump had normalized this mindset during his first administration. I was hardly being a crusty cynic when, in a January 3, 2018 column, “How President Trump Normalized Neoconservatism,” I foresaw the vanquishing of Venezuela:

Neoconservatives are pleased with President Trump’s foreign policy.

A couple of months back, Bloomberg’s Eli Lake let it be known that he was in neoconservative nirvana: ‘… for Venezuela, [Donald Trump] came very close to calling for regime change. ‘The United States has taken important steps to hold the regime accountable,’ Trump said. ‘We are prepared to take further action if the government of Venezuela persists on its path to impose authoritarian rule on the Venezuelan people.’

‘For a moment,” swooned Lake, ‘I closed my eyes and thought I was listening to a Weekly Standard editorial meeting.’ (“How President Trump Normalized Neoconservatism,” Ilana Mercer, January 3, 2018)

“Onward to Venezuela!” I wearily wrote. It was not a mysterious sense of foreboding. I was just following facts.

Then, I watched the lies with fascination. Now, I know all the tricks. Of course I did not vote for the man in 2024. And, of course Trump was bound to normalize genocide for Israel, albeit at a slower pace. 

Another of Trump’s hombres is Florida Representative Randy Fine. No sooner did the “Hebrew Hammer,” as he fondly calls himself, advise the Palestinian collective to “starve away”—than Trump rushed to pose by Fine’s side. The pair of them, two mountains of flesh as soft as sin, giving themselves over with passionate intensity to criminal complicity. That was in July of 2025. Come October of 2025, Trump endorsed Fine’s  candidacy.

Having gotten their hostages back, the inviolable Israelis, for their part, have settled into a different rhythm of genocide. The only thing that has come to an end in Israel are mass hostage protests. Since the Israeli-dictated “ceasefire” took effect on 10 October, upwards of 352 Palestinians have been murdered by Israel and over  900 injured. “Gaza is a living necropolis,” reports the Glia organization, also on the ground in Gaza.

Having kept up its standards, the majority of the casualties inflicted by the “most moral army in the world” are women, children and the elderly. You might look at these two diminutive brothers, small for their ages (for obvious reasons), and think kids. IDF terrorists, with far greater acuity than you, were able to discern “two suspects who crossed the yellow line,” and were conducting “suspicious activities on the ground.” …

… The REST. “Why The ‘National-Interest’ Standard Feels ‘Fake & Gay’ & Solidarity With Palestine Is Libertarian” is on The Unz Review and on LewRockwell.com. 

Now on ILANAMERCER.COM.

HASBARA UPDATES (11/26): ON TOM WOODS TV: GAZA IN RETROSPECT: BLOCK V. MERCER

Argument, Crime, Foreign Policy, GAZA, Israel, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, libertarianism, War

1 Reply

ILANA MERCER: Israel, state and civil society, is a degenerate, genocidal entity engaged in an extermination campaign against Palestinian Resistance. Solidarity with this resistance-based society is the ONLY libertarian position.

I was hoping to refute many more Hasbara points. But Walter’s format of presenting a long lecture packed with many Hasbara points did not allow me to puncture his disquisition with counterpoints, so as to address each of his points.

Please post your comments to these two spaces:

  1. The Comments section of this Tom Woods TV debate:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0g2XEGSyDk
  2.  The Unz Review, without which there is no truly diverse, dissident writing, left and right. The comments space to post your thoughts is “On Tom Woods TV: Gaza in Retrospect, Block V. Mercer.”    https://www.unz.com/imercer/on-tom-woods-tv-gaza-in-retrospect-block-v-mercer/
  3. The blog Comment space is open to you, too.
    https://barelyablog.com/on-tom-woods-tv-gaza-in-retrospect-block-v-mercer/#comments

Many thanks,

ilana

UPDATES (11/21) from X:

https://x.com/UncleFlapjacks/status/1991917293572612546

https://x.com/DerekWheeler42/status/1991917079306322137

UPDATE (11/22): Thanks, Pilot Dave on LinkedIn, for taking the time to support.

UPDATES (11/26):   One of the fallacies I was hoping to get to dispute during the Tom Woods TV debate was this myth-history:

“…the departure and expulsion of roughly 900,000 Jews from Arab countries following the founding of the state of Israel.” (Ha’aretz, Nov. 26)

The Zionist Occupied Government (ZOG)has submitted the resolution for a “U.S. Bill [that] Proposes ‘Jewish Refugee Day’ Commemorating Expulsion of Jews From Arab Nations.”

“If approved, Nov. 30 would commemorate the departure and expulsion of roughly 900,000 Jews from Arab countries following the founding of the state of Israel. The holiday was first adopted by Israel in 2014.” (“U.S. Bill Proposes ‘Jewish Refugee Day’ Commemorating Expulsion of Jews From Arab Nations“)

NEW ESSAY (NEWS 10/6): Free Speech After Charlie Kirk: An American Lesson For Pam Bondi, Donald Trump & Netanyahu

America, Anti-Semitism, Argument, Constitution, Donald Trump, Fascism, Foreign Policy, Free Speech, GAZA, Government, Individual Rights, Israel, Law, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, libertarianism, Liberty, Middle East, Natural Law, Palestinians, Racism, The State

1 Reply

Freedom needs no justification. It is an end unto itself. You are deficient in American solidarity if you don’t stand up for non-violent protest and all speech ~ilana 

New essay is “Free Speech After Charlie Kirk: An American Lesson For Pam Bondi, Donald Trump & Netanyahu.” It is featured on The Unz Review (as a leading essay), on The New American, and on LewRockwell.com, anti-state, anti-war, pro-market.

You can now read it on IlanaMercer.com.

https://www.ilanamercer.com/2025/10/free-speech-charlie-kirk-american-lesson-pam-bondi-donlad-trump-netanyahu/

Excerpt:

Let us be clear about what freedom of speech à la America truly means:

The words people speak, chant, write and tweet; the beliefs they are known to hold, the flags they fly or burn, the symbolic, non-violent ceremonies and rituals they enact, the insignia, paraphernalia; the goose-stepping, Hitler salutes they muck around with—provided no physical aggression is involved (violence against animals included), all this counts as protected speech, licit in natural law.

So long as oddities and idiosyncrasies, whether performed alone or in groups, thoughts harbored privately or shared in public—so long as no violence accompanies such speech or behavior; so long as your mitts stop at the next man’s face (or at the next mutt’s fury face, Kristi Noem): SPEECH. It’s all speech. It should be free, unfettered and as wild and as wanton as can be.

At their worst, expressions of ostensible antisemitism, Naziism, racisms or other antipathies amount to thought crimes, nothing more, if expressed as a belief system severally or collectively, rather than in palpably violent actions.  Whether your thoughts are spoken, chanted, written or preached; be they impolite or impolitic: they are, at worst, no more than thought crimes.

Thought crimes are nobody’s business in a free society. Thought crimes ought to be ferociously protected by a free people. By logical extension, any accusations of antisemitism, Naziism or other antipathies and racisms, are especially suspect when emitted as a meme from American institutionalized power structures.

One such obscenely wealthy and worthless power structure is the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), or Defamation League—a more apt moniker once suggested by Elon Musk, before he joined the ADL in severely censoring some speech on the X platform. The ADL is a meddlesome shakedown operation, in the mold of the Southern Poverty Law Center (“Smear Artists for the Total State,” wrote Tom DiLorenzo). It has taken it upon itself to decide who lives and who dies socially and financially on the basis of the unfortunate individual’s ideas, spoken and written.

In the American tradition, thoughts and words spoken or written that are politically impolite—again, racism; Naziism, antisemitism—retain protected status as speech beyond the adjudication of law-makers, bureaucrats, mediacrats, educrats and technocrats.

Sniffing out racists or anti-Semites is an absolute no-no for any and all self-respecting, libertarian-minded Americans, or any American, for that matter. Like creedal libertarians, Americans don’t, or should not, prosecute thought crimes or persecute thought “criminals.”

Ours should be The Skokie Standard of free speech and thinking (which I articulated in August 2022). What is The Skokie Standard of free speech? In 1978, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) took a stand for free speech by defending a neo-Nazi group that wanted to march through the Chicago suburb of Skokie, where many Holocaust survivors lived. The Skokie Standard of free speech is one that champions unpopular expression, and vigorously defends all marginalized speakers and thinkers, rather than purveying and protecting state and corporate ideology du jour.

…    Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk, RIP, got it. On May 2, 2024, Kirk wrote the following: “Hate speech does not exist legally in America. There’s ugly speech. There’s gross speech. There’s evil speech. And ALL of it is protected by the First Amendment. Keep America free.”

Trump’s Attorney General Pam Bondi doesn’t get it. No wonder even Glenn Greenwald, once a practicing constitutional attorney—and a man of manners and decorum—regularly appends “dumb” and “lacking any grasp of constitutional law” to any mention of Bondi, who said this after Kirk’s murder:

The Justice Department would “absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech…

…  Left, Right and libertarian; we can and must, then, join in unapologetically rejecting the very idea of policing, purging, persecuting or prosecuting people for holding and expressing politically unpopular ideas in action or in speech.

THE REST:  “Free Speech After Charlie Kirk: An American Lesson For Pam Bondi, Donald Trump & Netanyahu” is featured on The Unz Review (as a leading essay), on The New American, and on LewRockwell.com

Read it on IlanaMercer.com.

https://www.ilanamercer.com/2025/10/free-speech-charlie-kirk-american-lesson-pam-bondi-donlad-trump-netanyahu/

NEWS UPDATE (10/6):  Jeremy Scahill
“Hamas’s Strategic Gamble” by the dedicated and able Jeremy Scahill: “While President Trump enthusiastically welcomed Hamas’s response to his Gaza plan, the White House and Israel deal in deception.” (Drop Site News)